Processing of non-canonical word-order: a case-series on lesion-induced reorganized language and age-effects in typical development.

Complex grammatical structures are mastered late in language acquisition. We studied age-effects on performance in object topicalization in 48 typically developing German-speaking participants (aged 8-30years) and in five patients (children and adolescents) with lesion-induced atypical language representation. Production was tested by a sentence repetition task, comprehension by an acting out task. Three topicalized conditions with differing disambiguation (agreement, case, and case plus agreement) were contrasted with canonical control sentences. Children's (aged 8-13years) performance was significantly below that of adolescents and adults in all topicalized conditions. All participants made most mistakes in the agreement condition. Patients showed remarkable difficulties as compared with age-appropriate control groups in all topicalization conditions and across age-groups. Despite the small sample size, the consistency of these difficulties might hint to the importance of an intact typical neural language substrate for processing complex grammatical structures even in very early brain lesions.

Testing the language of German cerebral palsy patients with right hemispheric language organization after early left hemispheric damage.

Language functions are generally represented in the left cerebral hemisphere. After early (prenatally acquired or perinatally acquired) left hemispheric brain damage language functions may be salvaged by reorganization into the right hemisphere. This is different from brain lesions acquired in adulthood which normally lead to aphasia. Right hemispheric reorganized language (RL) is not associated with obvious language deficits. In this pilot study we compared a group of German-speaking patients with left hemispheric brain damage and RL with a group of matched healthy controls. The novel combination of reliable language lateralization as assessed by neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and specific linguistic tasks revealed significant differences between patients with RL and healthy controls in both language comprehension and production. Our results provide evidence for the hypothesis that RL is significantly different from normal left hemispheric language. This knowledge can be used to improve counselling of parents and to develop specific therapeutic approaches.